Our Daughter graduated from High School Friday.
She has so much to look forward to. Going to college in the fall, all sort of opportunities. We are so lucky. I feel very blessed to have two wonderful daughters.
It's going to be real transition for my wife and me when our youngest, graduates and goes on to college next year.
Someone told me once the best sort of planning is to plan for your next life transition. I guess that means plan before you have a baby, get a job, have a child leave home, leave a job, death of a loved one or your own death.
On the other hand, every so often life throws us a weird knuckle ball; no planning possible. I read something once that went like, "Do you know how to make God laugh?
Tell him your plans."
It goes that way sometimes. I have faith that whatever happens is for the best no matter how bad it seems at the moment. Not to say there isn't true evil in the world, and bad bad things happen, that as humans we have no idea how to explain or rationalize.
Prayer is a powerful thing to help me calm myself and remember how much I have to be thankful for.
We had people over for an open house yesterday. It was so good to see some family and friends we hadn't seen for awhile. I know there were lots of family and friends that would have come if they could...but distance, jobs, work and unfortunately sometimes illness come into play.
Very thankful for all the people who gave Rachel their best wishes, gifts and kind words of encouragement.
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We've had a bit of gray drizzly weather lately in the Pacific Northwest. Good weather to be inside; writing, working, studying, drinking coffee etc., eating, watching TV, playing games, conversing. I can't complain and as they say it wouldn't do any good anyway.
One thing I am thankful for this morning is that I'm not living in Cicada country. If I was I'm sure I'd get use to it. Maybe wear a Walkman or I-Pod to drown out the buzzing.
I'm watching "O Brother Where Art Thou". They just played the part where Delmar asks Everett, Care for some gopher?. You can hear the hymn singing folks moving to the river to be baptized in the background.
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Have you ever wondered if a million monkeys typed for a million years what the odds are that one of them would write this weblog? I'm thinking more like one monkey typing part time could get pretty close. I'm in that "nothing to say but too lazy to edit" mode.
Our younger daughter has an assignment to create a scrapbook of her life as an assignment for school. From what I gather it's due tomorrow and she got started about 4 pm. I'm thinking the title could be, "My short and happy life by Rebecca." Maybe she could just make up something like, my parents never let me get out much. Here's a picture of the closet they kept me in. It's sort of dark.
That sounds more like something I'd do, thank God, rather than my wise daughter. I used to have a knack for creative excuses for why I didn't have my homework done or why I was late or absent from school. I told the principle once that I was late because the train was stopped for some reason blocking the road I had to take to school. That had an element of truth in it anyway.
Once that principle let our vocational tech class work on his pickup. I learned to braze a little fixing his radiator. While backing his pickup out of the shop I was screwing around and joking with my friends and didn't close the passenger door of the principle's pickup. The pickup door caught on the garage door and bent all the way back to the front fender. My buddies told me I should go in and say, "Uhhhh Mr. Kober you know that door that used to be on your pickup?"
Another time a friend of mine and I were in the locker room horsing around when I was a freshman in high school. I think we were supposed to be outside on the football field for P.E. We were seeing who could climb a water pipe up the side of a wall in the locker room. I got about half way up the wall and the pipe broke. It started to spray high-pressure water all over the locker room; every one's clothes...the football teams uniforms. I had to go out on to the football field and say to the coach, "You know that pipe that used to be in the locker room?" Here's a sketch to give you an idea..
Sketch
Actually....I think I said, "Greg and I were just looking at the pipe and it broke." That was a bit of a joke for us nitwits. Once in the eighth grade Greg had been fiddling with a steam radiator valve in the back of the class (during class) and accidently unscrewed it. That caused steam to start spraying and a lot of hissing noise. Luckily know one was hurt. He told the teacher, "I was just looking at it and it broke."
Some people huh?
I knew a guy who was given the task of removing the paper from a high school float that was built on a flatbed truck. He took the float to the town dump and started pulling off the pom-poms or whatever they call those things they stick in the chicken wire on a float. That was taking too long so he decided it would be quicker if he just burned the paper off. I guess he thought the chicken wire was far enough from the paint of the truck to prevent damage to the new truck donated by a kind local merchant for use in the Homecoming Parade.
He was wrong.
Not sure what he ended up doing maybe he had a future at Burning Man.
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Sun is going down around here. I hope you had a great weekend.
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P.S. - Our daughter Becca ended up getting her Aunt, who is visiting from Minnesota, her sister, sister's friend who is a boy, and her Mom all involved in helping find pictures and creating a scrapbook of her life so far, for her school assignment this Monday. They had a great time doing it. Contrary to my assumption that she had just started, she had put considerable work into the writing part before yesterday. I saw her leaving for school this morning bright-eyed and ready to go.
Have you ever heard about the Ladder of Inference? The idea being you take a skimpy amount of information about something and then make a lot of inferences? or assumptions to come to a conclusion. Kind of like a police officer seeing a black guy walking down the street with a color TV or something like that. We all do it. I do it and want to try to cut back.
Last week we asked Rachel to pick her Aunt up at the airport. Rachel didn't want to drive her car, but wanted to take her Mom's (which she isn't insured for). I heard my wife say the words "CD player". I inferred Rachel wanted to take her Mom's car because it had a CD player. The actual deal was Rachel's car is full of books, volleyballs, basketballs, clothes etc....and was recently decorated with a lot of writing like "Class of 2004" "Go Seagulls" "Everett High Senior". She didn't think her Aunt would like to ride in that rig. I think it turned out just fine...but I'll try to stay lower on the ladder of inference today.
Peace to you and yours.
